Beowulf Off The Map

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Beowulf off the map

Alfred Hiatt
Anglo-Saxon England / Volume 38 / December 2009, pp 11 - 40
DOI: 10.1017/S026367510999010X, Published online: 01 March 2010
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S026367510999010X

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Alfred Hiatt (2009). Beowulf off the map. Anglo-Saxon England, 38, pp 11-40 doi:10.1017/
S026367510999010X
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Beowulf off the map

a l f r e d h iat t
abs t rac t
This essay uses maps that have illustrated Beowulf since Klaebers edition as a starting point for an exploration of spatial representation in the poem. It is argued that
modern maps do not offer particularly useful tools for understanding the poem, and
that chorography, that is, the description of regional space, may be a more accurate
term for analysis of Beowulf than geography. The poem presents a topography intimately connected to the interrelations of different peoples, and the frequent movement between past, present and future times. The nal section of the article considers
the postmedieval reception of spatial reference in Beowulf, disputes the presence of an
Anglo-Saxon migration myth in the poem, and raises some implications for genre that
result from spatial analysis.
Students of Beowulf have for many years encountered, in one form or another,
the map that appeared in Friedrich Klaebers denitive edition of the poem.
Entitled The Geography of Beowulf, Klaebers map shows the southern part
of the Scandinavian peninsula and north-western continental Europe in order
to supplement the editors elucidation of the peoples and places referred to,
however obliquely, in the poem (Fig. 1). Located opposite Klaebers introduction to Beowulf, and therefore seen by many readers before they began to
read the poem itself, The Geography of Beowulf seems to attempt to bridge
modern and medieval space. The rivers Vistula, Elbe, Ems, Rhine, Meuse,
and some cities and islands are given their twentieth-century toponyms, but
these co-exist with Old English ethnonyms taken from the poem: Sweon,
Heao-Reamas, Geatas (Gautar), Eotan, Fresan, Francan, Wylngas, Wendle
(Vandals), Gifas, and of course Dene, whose hall, Heorot, is marked in the
position of the settlement of Lejre on Zealand. The toponym Angeln, which
does not appear in the poem, is nevertheless placed in the vicinity of Schleswig.
Klaebers map appeared to make a scientic statement a grid of lines of
An early version of this article was delivered to the medieval English literature seminar at the
School of English, University of Leeds, and I am grateful to all present for their questions and
suggestions. For their helpful comments on and criticisms of subsequent drafts I would like to
thank Margaret Clunies Ross, Alaric Hall, Nicholas Perkins, Andrew Wawn and an anonymous
reader for ASE.
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Alfred Hiatt
Figure 1: Klaebers Geography of Beowulf. From Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr.
Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1950), p. viii.
longitude and latitude added an air of verisimilitude at once anachronistic and

pointless, since no co-ordinates were given but it was as much a work of
conjectural scholarship, and its condent location and glossing of peoples both
summarized and masked vigorous, even vitriolic, debate.
There is, however, a more fundamental problem with the map. It is not
evident that there is such as thing as a geography of Beowulf. Indeed Klaeber
himself expressed doubt on this matter. In the course of the introduction
to his edition, Klaeber speculated that the water route used by the poems
Swedes and Geatas may very well have been by way of the great lakes, Vner
and Vtter (both of which appear on Klaebers map), or even by the Baltic
Sea and Lake Mlar. But he also expressed an alternative: can we be sure that
the Anglo-Saxon poet had a clear knowledge of Northern geography? Is it not
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Beowulf off the map

rather likely that he would suppose all branches of the Scandinavians to be seafaring peoples? Certainly the topographical hints contained in the poem could
not be used successfully for denite localization.1 The poems sea cliffs, for
example, seem to be a part of a conventional description based on notions of
English scenery while nothing but poetic invention seems to be back of the
place-names Hronesns 2805, Earnans 3031, cf. Hrefnawudu 2925, Hrefnesholt
2935.2 As Klaebers comments indicate, the assumption that the Beowulf-poet
was possessed of detailed knowledge of Scandinavian geography carries implications for interpretation of the poem: to apply modern geographic knowledge
to the text risks treating it as history rather than ction, downplaying the role
of poetic invention and artistic licence. To these concerns it is possible to
add that geography as an independent discipline did not exist in the Middle
Ages. Geographic description certainly did exist, but always as part of other
arts and genres. Within the seven liberal arts, for example, geography would
have been understood as a part of geometry; it is under the sign of Geometria
that Martianus Capella introduced a lengthy description of the world in De
nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Geography was incorporated within historiography, eschatology, and within encyclopedic compilations such as Isidores
Etymologiae, and it is predominantly in these contexts and with these functions
that medieval maps appear.3 The connection between maps and literature was
not unknown in the Middle Ages for example, small topographic diagrams
do exist as glosses in a signicant number of manuscripts of the works of
Lucans Bellum civile and Sallusts Bellum Jugurthinum 4 but it is rare indeed for
a map to illustrate a vernacular literary work in the Middle Ages.
No map accompanies Beowulf as it appears in London, British Library,
Cotton Vitellius A. xv. Unlike medieval readers of the poem, however, twentieth- and twenty-rst-century readers seem to require cartographic assistance
in order to understand and fully appreciate Beowulf. Even the ill-fated 2005
IcelandicCanadian lm Beowulf and Grendel 5 opened with a faux-antique
map in order to contextualize the action to follow. Scholars have occasionally poked fun at Klaebers lines of longitude and latitude, and sometimes
1
2
3
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1950), p. xlvii.
Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, p. xlvii.
M. Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), pp. 311 and 321, lists the known AngloSaxon manuscripts for both Martianus and Isidore, as well as references to these works contained in citations and inventories of Latin books. The Etymologiae seems to have been one
of the twenty odd titles housed in the typical Anglo-Saxon library (p. 127); knowledge of
Martianus was far less extensive, though on the increase from the tenth century (p. 44, n. 66).
P. Gautier Dalch, Les diagrammes topographiques dans les manuscrits des classiques latins
(Lucain, Solin, Salluste), La Tradition Vive: Mlanges dhistoire des texts en lhonneur de Louis Holtz,
ed. Pierre Lardet (Paris, 2003), pp. 291306.
Dir. Sturla Gunnarsson: www.beowulfandgrendel.com.
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Alfred Hiatt
questioned the utility of his map,6 but editors and commentators continue
to supply students of the poem with less anachronistic and occasionally
more humorous maps of essentially the same geographic area.7 In his recent
Companion, for example, Andy Orchard printed a Map of Scandinavia in
Beowulfs day, designed by Katharine Scarfe Beckett (Fig. 2).8 This shows
almost exactly the same area represented in Klaebers map; lines of longitude
and latitude are banished, along with toponyms, including Heorot, but a scale
and compass have appeared in the lower right corner, monsters adorn the
North and Baltic seas, and a series of vignettes illustrates key moments and
characters from the poem. A Viking ship shuttles between the land of the
Geatas and the Danes, where Grendel crouches in his mere. The dragon lurks
on his hoard in Beowulfs homeland, while the hero himself appears (along
with Breca) battling one of the nicoras beneath the land of the Heathormas.
Beowulfs coastal stronghold, burning after the dragons attack, is located at
the far south of the Scandinavian peninsula but alongside it appears a curved
line that represents his funeral barrow, both simultaneously present in literary space-time.9 And in what is perhaps the maps best and quietest joke, just
off the Frisian coast a man appears rowing a boat and regarding seagulls in
the water: this escapee from The Seafarer is designed to remind scholars and
students of Old English literature that, as Scarfe Beckett puts it, none of
the poems stands in isolation from the others in the corpus we understand
them in relation to each other.10 Playfully and self-consciously anachronistic,
then, Scarfe Becketts map is far closer to a medieval map than Klaebers in
its willingness to portray the monstrous within a geographic frame, and in its
inclusion of narrative elements.11
6
8
9
10
11
J. D. Niles, Myth and History, A Beowulf Handbook, ed. R. E. Bjork and J. D. Niles (Exeter,
1997), pp. 21332, at 2256; J. Bazelmans, By Weapons Made Worthy: Lords, Retainers and their
Relationship in Beowulf (Amsterdam, 1999), p. 125.
In their edition of 1998 Mitchell and Robinson print a map explicitly based on Klaebers,
though with longitudinal and latitudinal lines removed. The Hetware are moved to the
east of the Rhine, but otherwise the positions of tribes and places (including Heorot) are
unchanged: Beowulf: an Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts, ed. B. Mitchell and F. C. Robinson
(Oxford, 1998), p. xiii. See most recently Beowulf: a New Translation for Oral Delivery, trans. D.
Ringler (Indianapolis, 2007), p. viii, for another adaptation of Klaebers map (with ethnonyms
modernized, including Battle-Rams for Heao-Reamas).
A. Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge, 2003), p. xiii.
I am very grateful to Katharine Scarfe Beckett for her generous and informative commentary
on this map.
Personal Communication, 23 November 2008.
For an interesting departure from the conventional cartographic model, see the preliminary
conceptual map of the tribes of Beowulf, constructed in 1984 and printed in G. R. Overing
and M. Osborn, Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World (Minneapolis,
1994), esp. pp. xvxix. This image consists of ve interlocking rectangles and squares, the
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Beowulf off the map
Figure 2: Map of Scandinavia in Beowulfs day, designed by Katharine Scarfe Beckett, from
A. Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge, 2003), p. xiii.
largest and most central of which is marked Denmark (Heorot), and contains a representation of Grendelsmere. Osborn has continued to explore the connection between Beowulf and
the landscape around Lejre: see M. Osborn, Verbal Sea-Charts and Beowulf s Approach to
Denmark, De Gustibus: Essays for Alain Renoir, ed. J. M. Foley (New York, 1992), pp. 44155,
and Beowulf and Lejre, ed. J. D. Niles and M. Osborn (Tempe, 2007).
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Most recently, the appearance of a fourth edition of Klaebers Beowulf
has seen a subtle shift in the use of cartographic aids to the reader. In this
revised and updated edition two maps, one of Scandinavia and one of Britain,
appear as part of a preliminary section consisting of gures relevant to the
poem (Fig. 3).12 The caption The Geography of Beowulf has gone, replaced
by The North Sea Cultural Zone. The map of Scandinavia shows, again,
essentially the same area that appears on Klaebers map, marking the rivers
Rhine, Weder, Elbe and Oder, as well as the lands of Frisia, Jutland, Skne,
Gtaland and Uppland, but its sixteen toponyms represent archaeological
sites, rather than places explicitly mentioned in the poem. The maps in the
revised Klaeber are designed to serve as illustrations of the editors introduction to the poem, rather than of Beowulf itself. Cartography is, then, uncoupled
from the poem; at the same time, the decision to print the two overlapping
maps, with Britain given the same prominence as Scandinavia, implies an
equivalence and parallel between these spaces. As I will suggest, this equation
of Britain and Scandinavia derives not from the poem itself, but from modern
scholarship.
In the last few years scholars have begun to focus with growing intensity
on the sense of place expressed in Beowulf. The most inuential contribution
to this area has surely been Nicholas Howes exploration of Beowulf and
the Ancestral Homeland in his study of the Anglo-Saxon migration myth
in Old English literature.13 More recently, two scholars have approached
this topic from somewhat different angles: while John D. Niles has studied
the heroic geography of the poem in the course of constructing a revised
version of Klaebers map,14 Fabienne Michelet has discussed the spatial
imaginaire of Beowulf, in particular the poems representation of centrality and
marginality.15 Despite the differences of their approaches, Howe, Niles and
12
13
14
15
Klaebers Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, R. E. Bjork, and J. D. Niles, 4th ed.
(Toronto, 2008), p. xvii.
N. Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven, 1989), pp. 14380.
Howe briey returns to his spatial analysis of Beowulf in Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England:
Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven, 2008), pp. 18892. Focusing on 22002214a, he
argues that the poem contrasts the grimly endangered homeland of Geatland with the alluring elsewhere of Denmark, both viewed from the perspective of Englalond.
J. D. Niles, Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 11940.
Niles acknowledges the anachronism involved in superimposing medieval toponyms and ethnonyms on a modern map, but argues that the only alternative would be to map those same
names onto a chiey undifferentiated blob; and though maps of that kind were drawn in the
Middle Ages, it is hard to see what reason there could be for producing one today (p. 120).
He does not consider the alternative of not producing a map.
F. L. Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English
Literature (Oxford, 2006), esp. pp. 74114. Michelet denes spatial imaginaire in Le Goffian
terms as the socially and culturally conditioned representations and conceptualizations of
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Beowulf off the map
Figure 3: Maps of Scandinavia and Britain by Elizabeth Fine Simcock, from Klaebers Beowulf
and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, R. E. Bjork, and J. D. Niles, 4th ed. (Toronto, 2008),
p. xvii.
the surrounding world and of the cosmos (pp. 89). See also A. K. Siewers, Landscapes of
Conversion: Guthlacs Mound and Grendels Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon NationBuilding, Viator 34 (2003), 139; and most recently I. Valtonen, The North in the Old English
Orosius: a Geographical Narrative in Context (Helsinki, 2008), pp. 20013.
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Alfred Hiatt
Michelet all refer to the geography and even the poetic cartography16 of
Beowulf. Yet these and other studies have not, I will suggest, confronted the
central problem raised by Klaeber: the absence of geography in either a modern
or medieval sense from the poem. In Beowulf there is almost no attempt to
locate the events of the poem within a world geography. What is present
in the poem is a shifting sense of regional space, at times relatively precise,
at others vague. For this reason the term geography is not only somewhat
anachronistic but also unhelpful when applied to Beowulf.
Instead, I suggest that we might gain a more accurate analysis of the sense
of region in the poem by using the term chorography. It must be admitted
at once that this term is in some ways no less anachronistic than geography.
Chorography literally refers to the description of an area or region (Gr. khra);
and, although it could be used as a synonym for geography or as a term for a
world map in the classical and medieval era,17 it was notably dened by Ptolemy
of Alexandria as a practice distinct from geography. For Ptolemy, gegraphia
was the imitation through drawing of the entire known part of the world, while
chrographia was an independent discipline which sets out the individual
localities, each one independently and by itself, registering practically everything
down to the least thing therein instead of the broader, general outlines shown
by gegraphia. Ptolemy memorably described the goal of chrographia as
an impression of a part, as when one makes an image of just an ear or an eye,
as against gegraphia, which sought a general view, analogous to making a
portrait of the whole head.18 I make no suggestion that Ptolemys Geographia
was known in Anglo-Saxon England.19 Nor can it be argued that a concept
resembling Ptolemys understanding of chorgraphia, with its demand for
precise delineation of local features, existed as an independent discipline in
Anglo-Saxon England.20 Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the term is more
useful than geography for an understanding of Beowulf because it denotes the
16
17
18
19
20
Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 76.

For example, Strabo seems to use the term to refer to detailed topographic and regional
description: Geography II.v.27, cf. V.ccxxiv, V.ccxxv. It seems to have been in the sense of
world map or world description that the term was used in the early ninth century by the
Irishman Dicuil: Quem diuus Augustus primus omnium per Chorograam ostendit; Dicuili
Liber de mensura orbis terrae, ed. J. J. Tierney (Dublin, 1967), I.ii.
J. L. Berggren and A. Jones, Ptolemys Geography: an Annotated Translation of the Theoretical
Chapters (Princeton, 2000), I.i.
On medieval knowledge of the Geographia see P. Gautier Dalch, Le souvenir de la Gographie
de Ptolme dans le monde latin medieval (VIeXIVe sicles), Evphrosyne 27 (1999), 79106.
It was not until the rediscovery of Ptolemys work in the Latin west in the fteenth century
that the category of chorography was used and rened in humanist thought and writing, in
relation not only to geography, but also to a third term, topography.
The topographic nature of boundary-clauses in Anglo-Saxon charters indicates the existence
of careful local mapping for administrative and legal purposes, however. For discussion see,
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Beowulf off the map

conscious description of a part rather than the whole of regional, as opposed
to world space. Unlike texts such as the Old English Orosius, which elaborate
and celebrate a description of the known world, the regional setting of Beowulf
and its peoples is invoked repeatedly, and at key moments. Further, I suggest
that we should think of chorography not in cartographic terms, as the production of a regional map, but in literary terms. The poem does evoke a sense of
space, in which one may discern a preoccupation with coastlines, sea-crossings,
and the interactions of peoples at once separated and connected by water. Its
chorography does not, however, equate to visual representation of such formations and relationships. The use of maps is indeed crucial if one is to understand
modern scholarly attempts to locate the action of the poem. But perhaps the rst
step in reading Beowulf from a spatial perspective should be to liberate it from
cartography: to begin to read it without maps, physical or mental.
between s ea s
The cartographic legacy of Anglo-Saxon England is conned to a single artifact,
the Cotton world map (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, 56v),
which is usually dated to the tenth or early eleventh century, and is therefore
roughly contemporaneous with the Beowulf manuscript (Fig. 4).21 Some aspects
of this map can be considered in analogy to the poem. In particular, the Cotton
map presents an unusually well-articulated representation of the British Isles and
the North Sea coast, with ethnonyms appearing in Old English as well as Latin.
Demarcation of Subryttas in Brittany, Scriennas on an island (marked
Island) that may represent Scandinavia, Sclaui and Sleswic in northern
continental Europe, and Neronorroen on a peninsula to the east of northern
Britain indicates a sustained level of interest in the north-west.22 However, the
map contains many features that lie beyond the scope of Beowulf; it is an image
21
22
for example, D. Hooke, The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998), esp. pp. 84102;
N. Howe, An Angle on the Earth, Bull. of the John Rylands Lib. 82.1 (2000), 327.
On the Cotton map, see in particular P. McGurk, The Mappa Mundi, An Eleventh-Century
Anglo-Saxon Illustrated Miscellany (British Library Cotton Tiberius B.v. Part I ), ed. P. McGurk, D. N.
Dumville, M. R. Godden, A. Knock (Copenhagen, 1983), pp. 7986; E. Edson, Mapping Time and
Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (London, 1997), pp. 7480; also B. Englisch,
Ordo orbis terrae: die Weltsicht in den Mappae mundi des frhen und hohen Mittelalters (Berlin, 2002), pp.
24558, 5901, P. Barber, Medieval Maps of the World, The Hereford World Map: Medieval World
Maps and their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London, 2006), pp. 144, at 48, Valtonen, The North
in the Old English Orosius, pp. 22151. For the map as an example of the hyperreal, see M. K.
Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print
(Gainesville, 2007), pp. 11058. P. D. A. Harvey has argued strongly that the map ultimately
derives from an ancient Roman original: see Medieval Maps (London, 1991), pp. 215.
On the names, and for the suggestion that Neronorroen refers to Norway rather than
Denmark, see McGurk, The Mappa Mundi, pp. 81, 867; Valtonen, The North in the Old
English Orosius, pp. 23141.
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Alfred Hiatt
Figure 4: London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.V, 56v. The Cotton or Anglo-Saxon
world map. East at top.
of the known world that extends from the columns of Hercules in the far west
to Taprobana in the east, and from Scythia, and Gog and Magog, in the north
to Ethiopia in the south. Its manuscript context suggests that the map may have
been read in conjunction with the themes of pilgrimage and the computus, and
it has been plausibly though not certainly connected to Priscians translation of
20
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Beowulf off the map

the Periegesis of Dionysius, a copy of which appears in the same manuscript.23
Versions of other surviving medieval maps were almost certainly known in
Anglo-Saxon England, and especially if a broad denition of map is allowed,
including purely verbal maps it is undeniable that from the age of Bede, and
certainly by the tenth and eleventh centuries, a culture existed in which both
global and local mapping practices were known within educated circles.24 Yet to
what extent can such a culture usefully be connected with Beowulf?
Classical and late antique geographic sources left Scandinavia and north-west
Europe generally peripheral areas. That is not to say that they were not represented, and medieval texts on occasions supplemented classical descriptions of
the north-west with more detailed information about the region.25 Scandinavia,
or Scandza (Scanzia, Scada, Ganzmir), could appear as an island, as it does on
the Cotton map, or as a peninsula; the cartographic evidence suggests that the
toponym could be considered to be synonymous with Norwegia.26 Suevia is
arguably used on some medieval maps to represent Sweden, though it may in
fact refer to Swabia or the land of the Suevi; more denitely, Matthew Pariss
world maps designated a Suescia, while an inscription on the Ebstorf mappa
mundi (probably c. 1300) refers to a Sweonia interior.27 Dacia was used on
several world maps to designate Denmark (as well as the Roman province in
modern Romania and eastern Hungary). The terminus Danorum et Saxonum
is represented on two surviving medieval mappae mundi (the twelfth-century
23
24
25
26
27
McGurk questioned the connection between the Cotton map and the Periegesis, but Edson
argues that although the map was probably not specically made to illustrate the poem, it
may have been used for this function: Mapping Time and Space, pp. 767.
C. Delano-Smith and R. J. P. Kain, English Maps: a History (London, 1999), pp. 812; P. D. A.
Harvey, Maps in the Age of Bede (Jarrow Lecture, 2006). Just a few pictorial maps survive
from Anglo-Saxon England. The only surviving map that can be denitively dated to Bedes
lifetime is the plan of the Tabernacle within Solomons Temple in the Codex Amiatinus; Bede
also incorporated Adomnns plans illustrating De locis sanctis into his own work of the same
name. In addition, manuscripts of Bedes De natura rerum and De temporum ratione contain diagrams showing the division of the known world into three partes, or the division of the entire
earth into ve zones. A zonal map appears in the same manuscript as the Cotton world map.
It seems likely that a manuscript of Cosmas Indicopleustes Christian Topography was brought
to Anglo-Saxon England by Archbishop Theodore: Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 32,
177, and there is evidence that it was available in Southumbria in the early ninth century: S.
Keynes, Between Bede and the Chronicle: London, BL, Cotton Vespasian B.vi, fols. 1049,
in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. K.
OBrien OKeeffe and A. Orchard, 2 vols. (Toronto, 2005) I, 4767, at 545.
See A. H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005).
For a comprehensive survey, see L. S. Chekin, Northern Eurasia in Medieval Cartography:
Inventory, Text, Translation, and Commentary (Turnhout, 2006). McGurk, The Mappa Mundi,
p. 81, emphasizes the unusual and precocious nature of the Cotton maps representation of
northern Europe.
Chekin, Northern Eurasia in Medieval Cartography, p. 248.
21
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Alfred Hiatt
Figure 5: Reykjavk, Stofnun rna Magnssonar, GKS 1812 4, 5v-6r. Thirteenth-century

Icelandic map. South at top. The earth divided between the partes of Asia (left half of map),
Africa (upper right quadrant), and Europe (lower right quadrant), surrounded by Ocean
and with winds marked in outer circle. The toponyms Tile, Island, Norvegie, Gautland,
Suiiod, and Rusia appear within Europe on a north-west axis.
Sawley map and the Hereford map), and Danmorc appears on the remarkable
thirteenth-century Icelandic map, which also arranges the toponyms Tile,
Island, Norvegie, Gautland, Suiiod and Rusia schematically, on a northwest axis (Fig. 5).28 But there was no stable spatial order for the representation of these peoples and places, and consequently no consolidated image of
Scandinavia can be said to have existed before at least the fteenth century.
No surviving medieval map ts the description of the region given in Beowulf,
which is why modern editors have resorted to modern maps.
A world image is invoked only once in Beowulf, when towards the beginning
28
Reykjavk, Stofnun rna Magnssonar, GKS 1812 4, 5v6r. The manuscript contains miscellaneous astronomical and calendrical material, including extracts from Bedes De natura rerum
and John of Sacroboscos De sphera; the map is immediately preceded by a list of Icelandic
bishops: Chekin, Northern Eurasia in Medieval Cartography, pp. 6971; R. Simek, Altnordische
Kosmographie: Studien und Quellen zu Weltbild und Weltbeschreibung in Norwegen und Island vom 12. bis
zum 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1990), pp. 702, 41924.
22
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Beowulf off the map

of the poem, and just prior to Grendels attack, the scop in Heorot utters the
song of creation. The scop praises Gods creation of the earth, wlitebeorhtne
wang, swa wter bebuge, with the sun and moon to provide light for land
dwellers.29 This description can be equated to the fairly standard medieval
conception, present in both classical and Norse cosmography, of the known
world as an expanse surrounded by an encircling ocean, around which the
sun and moon revolve. The wang is divided into regions made fertile by the
Almighty, and subsequently populated. In the immediate wake of these lines,
however, the focus of the poem turns to the local with the announcement of
the onset of Grendel. Thereafter the sense of a world image, immanent in the
scops description of creation, is scarcely visible.
In only one phrase in the poem does a world geography, arguably, linger:
the formulaic expression be sm tweonum (between the two seas), used characteristically to describe the extent of a rulers greatness or fame. It has usually
been supposed that the phrase originated in a reference to the North and
Baltic seas, derived from the pre-migration position of the ancestors of the
Anglo-Saxons.30 Some commentators have argued that be sm tweonum could be
understood, alternatively, as a generic expression unmoored from specic geographic content, and meaning simply throughout the earth.31 A further possibility is that the phrase refers to the encircling and equatorial seas of medieval
cosmographical theory, as expounded in texts such as Macrobiuss Commentarii
in Somnium Scipionis.32 The evidence from the poem is ambiguous on this point.
At times between the two seas does appear to invoke a world geography, as
in the description of Beowulfs prowess at 857b861:
29
30
31
32
Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, 4th ed., 89b98: a beautiful expanse as far as water surrounds. All
further references to Beowulf are to this edition unless otherwise stated. Translations are mine
unless otherwise indicated.
E.g. N. Outzen, Das angelschsische Gedicht Beowulf, als die schtzbarste Urkunde des
hchsten Alterthums von unserm Vaterlande, Kieler Bltter 3 (1816), 30727, at 318.
Beowulf, ed. Mitchell and Robinson, p. 296, s.v. tweone. OE s could be used to translate Lat.
mare, as in Aelfrics De temporibus anni, I.x. The expression be sm tweonum notably appears
in the Old English Exodus, lines 4436 (Gods speech to Abraham), and line 563 (Moses
speech). Lucas glosses the phrase as perhaps meaning in entirety, and mentions its possible derivation from Ex. XXIII.31, between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, or Num.
XXXIV.612, between the Mediterranean and the line of the Jordan: Exodus, ed. P. J. Lucas
(London, 1977), p. 131. Howe discusses the phrase in Migration and Mythmaking, pp. 8992,
noting its sweeping sense of everywhere, but arguing that its three appearances in Beowulf
simultaneously contain a local reference to the Baltic and North Seas and a much more
broad meaning, because [t]he Germania between these seas is everywhere for this people,
because it is there that the hero is known and celebrated (p. 90).
Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig,
1963), 2.9. The editors of Klaebers Beowulf suggest along similar lines that the expression [be
sm tweonum] may rather denote the seas located at the edges of the known world: p. 165.
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Alfred Hiatt
monig oft gecw
tte su ne nor
be sm tweonum
ofer eormengrund
oer nnig
under swegles begong
selra nre
rondhbbendra,
rices wyrra33
Elsewhere a more restricted topography seems to be invoked: schere is said

to be the dearest companion to Hrogar be sm tweonum (1297b); Hrogar
himself is styled by Beowulf
woroldcyninga
m selestan
be sm tweonum
ara e on Scedenigge
sceattas dlde;34
and the description of Offa as ealles moncynnes mine gefrge/ one selestan
bi sm tweonum35 could be read as a qualication (the best of the region) or
as hyperbole (the best of the entire known world). Even if we allow that the
phrase conjures up a world geography in all instances, however, it is clear that
the world space is envisaged only in conjunction with superlatives, and only
in association with great rulers. Most signicantly, the world is invoked as the
measure of virtue, whether conceived as military prowess, loyalty and love
of companions, generosity to retainers, or all of these things. At moments of
heightened poetic diction the world appears, usually as a backdrop to the gure
of a king, and never subject to detailed description.
As only a glance through the glossary of proper names in a modern edition
of Beowulf reveals, though, detail of a more local, regional kind is remarkably
prevalent in the poem. As Klaeber noted, coastal topography recurs throughout, from the departure of Scyld at the beginning through to the funeral of
Beowulf. Two episodes early in the poem allude to a more specic chorography: the journey of Beowulf and his men to the land of the Danes, and the
yting with Unfer.
Having heard of Hrogars miseries at the hands of Grendel, Beowulf
resolves to provide the old king with assistance. He leads fourteen other handpicked men to a ship lying at the ready in a harbour: on yum,/ . . . under
beorge, where the water meets the sand (sund wi sande).36 At this point
Beowulfs expertise is emphasized: sea-skilled, he shows his men the way to
the shore (landgemyrcu, literally land-boundaries) (209b). The journey that
33
34
35
36
Many often said that south or north, between the two seas across the vast earth there was no
other under the skys circuit better amongst shieldsmen or more worthy of a kingdom.
Beowulf, 1684b1686: [to] the best of worldly kings between the two seas who gave out coins
in Scedenigge [Skne].
Beowulf, 19556: the best of all mankind, Ive heard, between the two seas.
Beowulf, 207a213a: on the waves . . . under the cliff .
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follows lasts just seven and a half lines. The ship, bird-like (fugle gelicost),
is blown by the wind over the sea for at least a day, until the men sight land
more cliffs (brimclifu, beorgas steape, side snssas), symmetrically balancing the beorg from which they departed.37 The subsequent exchange with
the coast guard establishes more than just generic coastal description, however.
The guard swiftly identies the land on which the Geatas have arrived as of the
Danes (242a, 253b), and, on learning of the origin of Beowulf and his men, he
envisages their return journey to Wedermearce (298b). Despite its apparent
vagueness, then, the early part of the poem reveals a consistent preoccupation
with borders and boundaries. Not only is its chief monster a mre mearcstapa
(renowned border-stepper) (103a), it sketches out with relative economy a
coastal chorography expressed in terms of ethnic identity, in which the border
of the Geatas lies around a days travel across the sea from the land of the
Danes. Hrogars hall, of course, lies some distance inland, but the return
of the guard to the coast, emphatically announced at lines 318b19, reminds
us of a broader context of threats to the border from without. That sense
of a regional chorography is developed in the two descriptions of Beowulfs
contest with Breca that constitute the yting episode.
The rst, briefer, description by Unfer describes some kind of a contest
(swimming or rowing) between the two men at sea as the result of a dolgilp.38
The time of year is winter (516a), and the contest lasts for seven nights (517a).
The men are initially described in terms of their command of the sea (they
cover it with their arms, move their hands quickly, and glide over it), but
before long the conditions and the length of time leave them on wteres
ht.39 According to Unfer, Breca wins the competition because of his greater
strength. In the morning (presumably of the eighth day) the ocean carries him
on Heao-Rmes, from where he seeks his homeland, lond Brondinga,
37
38
39
Beowulf, 217224a. The length of time the voyage takes is disputed: Klaeber thought line 219
(o t ymb antid ores dogores) might mean one day and a reasonable space of time of
another day, but doubted that the distance from Beowulfs home to the coast near Hleir
could really have been covered in so short a time: Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, 3rd ed., p. 137; Osbern
and Overing tried to prove Klaeber wrong in their recreation of Beowulfs voyage: Landscape
of Desire, pp. 112. Several critics, such as T. Burns Haber, A Comparative Study of the Beowulf
and the Aeneid (Princeton, 1931), pp. 1218 and T. M. Andersson, Early Epic Scenery: Homer,
Virgil, and the Medieval Legacy (Ithaca, 1976), pp. 14559 have argued for Virgilian inuence in
the description of the voyage to Denmark.
Beowulf, 509a: foolish boast. For an assessment of the arguments, see R. Frank, Mere and
Sund: Two Sea-Changes in Beowulf , Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature. Essays in
Honour of Stanley B. Greeneld, ed. P. Rugg Brown et al. (Toronto, 1986), pp. 15372, and R. D.
Fulk, Aoat in Semantic Space: Old English sund and the Nature of Beowulf s Exploit with
Breca, JEGP 104 (2005), 45672; for detailed analysis of the entire exchange, see Orchard,
Critical Companion, pp. 24756.
Beowulf, 516b: in the waters possession.
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Alfred Hiatt
where he possesses people, a stronghold, and rings (519523a). Beowulfs
reply to Unfer is much longer (seventy-six lines against twenty-two), and contains important additional information, yet it is structurally similar. The episode
is subtly regured as the result of a vow (535536a, wit . . . gebeotedon), but
again it concludes with one of the contestants Beowulf, this time reaching
land. Whereas Unfer describes the contest in terms of the opposition of the
two men not only to each other but also to the sea itself, Beowulf introduces
a new factor: the sea-monsters (meresc, meredeor, nicor) who assail him,
and who eventually pay with their lives, to the relief of seafarers, who apparently were previously menaced by the beasts. The sea-monsters only strike
after ve nights, when the two combatants, hitherto inseparable, are driven
apart by the surging waters and the north wind (5448).
Crucially, Beowulf appears to trump Breca not only in his tally of nine sea
monsters (574b575a, ic mid sweorde ofsloh/ niceras nigene) versus, presumably, nil but in his eventual landing place. Like Breca, he reaches land
in the morning (of the sixth day?), and once more we see the description of a
coastal topography: the waters carried him so that ic snssas geseon mihte,/
windige weallas.40 But it is no insignicant detail that the sea is said to have
carried him on Finna land (580b). The poem gives no indication as to the
precise location of this land, and consequently one cannot be dogmatic about
its meaning.41 It seems reasonable, however, to follow the Old English Orosius
here, in which Finnas are described among the northern-most inhabitants of
Scandinavia;42 the Heao-Rmas, by contrast, are generally thought to refer
to a tribe located further south.43 Neither Beowulf nor Unfer states where
the competition began, nor what its purpose was, whether it was a race, or
perhaps more likely an endurance test to see who could last longest and get
furthest. But it is possible to infer that the two contestants leave the land of the
Geatas, travel north (hence the disruptive effects of the wind), and reach the
modern-day Norwegian coast in the case of Beowulf, but perhaps Breca too,
entering the North Sea. Beowulf accuses Unfer of speaking only of Brecas
journey, and his counter-narrative establishes a triumph that is both spatial
40
41
42
43
Beowulf, 571572a: I was able to see sea-cliffs, the windswept walls.

See Valtonen, The North in the Old English Orosius, p. 208, for different possible localizations,
and the suggestion that Finna land . . . may have functioned as a euphemism for a distant land,
no particular place in the remote north.
The Old English Orosius, ed. J. Bately, EETS ss 6 (London, 1980), e.g. p. 14: He [sc. Ohthere]
sde eah t [t] land sie swie lang nor onan, ac hit is eal weste, buton on feawum
stowum styccemlum wicia Finnas . . . For discussion of the term Finnas, possibly a reference to the Sami, in the Old English Orosius see Valtonen, The North in the Old English Orosius,
pp. 37386.
For different possibilities see Klaebers Beowulf, p. 149, n. 6.
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and temporal: he travelled further north than Breca in a shorter time and, of
course, with a superior harvest of monsters.
Like Beowulfs yting with Unfer, the Old English Orosius contains two
accounts of northern explorations apparently given to a king (Alfred) one,
Ohtheres, to the northernmost extent of the Scandinavian peninsula, and
the other, Wulfstans, to the east into the Baltic area. The similarities do not
quite end there, since Ohthere emphasizes the Finnas prowess at catching
sea-beasts, such as walruses, seals and whales, to the extent that he syxa sum
ofsloge syxtig on twam dagum.44 The land of the Northmen is coastal, and its
interior includes wilde moras.45 Both Wulfstan and Ohthere identify a territory called Denamearc, as well as land belonging to the Sweon.46 The geographic boundaries of these entities are not precisely dened, although there is
some evidence to suggest that the extent of the Danish lands was understood
to encompass parts of the Scandinavian peninsula, as well as Jutland and the
Danish islands.47 Wulfstan even describes crematory practices among the
Este not unlike those represented at key moments in Beowulf. The spatial
knowledge and some of the ethnographic preoccupations of the Old English
Orosius appear, in other words, similar to those of Beowulf. But here we come
up against the same problem seen in discussions of the geography of Beowulf
a tendency to superimpose a modern map of Scandinavia upon medieval
descriptions which appear, by contrast, frustratingly imprecise. The Latin
description of Orosius operates by repeated identication of spatial relationships to the four points of the compass. While the accounts of Ohthere and
Wulfstan retain this mode to some degree, they also introduce the mode of the
itinerary, in which a narrator gives an account of a journey, including reports
of an ethnographic nature. The effect is to supplement to supply, add to, but
also interrupt geographic description. A regional chorography emerges; not,
that is, a map, nor a history, but a verbal description of a coherent set of spatial
juxtapositions and ethnic interrelationships. We are told, for instance, that a
Cwenas hergia hwilum on a Normen ofer one mor, hwilum a Normen
on hy, 7r sint swie micle meras fersce geond a moras . . .48 Topography
44
45
46
47
48
Old English Orosius, p. 15: as one of the six he killed sixty in two days. For discussion of this
phrase see Valtonen, The North in the Old English Orosius, pp. 3089.
Old English Orosius, p. 15.
Old English Orosius, pp. 15, 16.
See Batelys commentary: Old English Orosius, pp. 1956, and compare Valtonen, The North
in the Old English Orosius, pp. 34454.
Old English Orosius, p. 15: the Cwenas sometimes make raids on the Northmen across the
highland, sometimes the Northmen do the same to them, and there are very great fresh-water
lakes beyond the highlands. On the Cwenas, see Valtonen, The North in the Old English
Orosius, pp. 386402.
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Alfred Hiatt
here is of secondary importance to the interaction of two peoples, and the
presence of valuable resources.
interrelat io n s
The distinction between the Heao-Rmas and the Finnas made in the Breca
episode allows at least the possibility that the Beowulf-poet was working with a
clear if schematic regional setting in mind, in which certain peoples were known
to live further north than others. It also suggests that the audience of the poem
may have possessed a rough idea of the locations of different ethnic groups.49 This
is something slightly different from the cataloguing that takes place in poems like
Widsi and Deor. In Widsi a large number of ethnonyms are provided, encompassing more or less the known world, with an emphasis on Germanic tribes. Yet, at
least in the form in which the poem survives, it is difficult to discern an underlying
order in their presentation. Occasionally, spatial and ethnic congruence is apparent in Widsi, as in the sequence in lines 8284a: Israelites, Assyrians, Hebrews,
Jews, Egyptians, Medes, Persians. However, there are many more spatial discontinuities than continuities, perhaps most spectacularly seen in 76: Mid Creacum
ic ws ond mid Finnum ond mid Casere.50 An examination of the ethnonyms
and toponyms in Beowulf, by contrast, reveals that the former tend to be deployed
to elaborate something approaching a sense of region, while the latter tend to be
restricted to specic coastal features such as headlands, or interior features such
as woods, only occasionally denoting something like an expanse of territory.51
Apart from the many references to Danes, Geatas and Swedes, there are
at least sixteen ethnonyms in Beowulf, some of which have been the subject
of extended critical discussion: Brondingas (521b, Brecas people), Brosingas
(1199b), Eotan (902b, 1072a, 1088a, 1141a, 1145a),52 Finnas (580b), Francan
(1210a, 2912a), Fresan/Frysan (1093b, 1104a, 1207a, 2912a, 2915b), Gifas
(2494a),53 Heao-Beardan (2032b, 2037b, 2067a),54 Heao-Rmas (519a),
49
50
51
52
53
54
The spatial knowledge and expectations of the poems audience were not addressed by D.
Whitelock in her seminal study, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford, 1951).
Widsi, ed. K. Malone, rev. ed. (Copenhagen, 1962): I was with the Greeks and with the
Finnas and with Caesar.
Malone argued that ethnonyms should be understood as toponyms and translated as such:
K. Malone, King Alfreds Geats, MLR 20 (1925), 111; King Alfreds Gotland, MLR 23
(1928), 3369.
The debate about Beowulf s references to Jutes has recently been reopened by Niles, Old
English Heroic Poems, pp. 12430, who argues that four of the poems ve references to Eotan
refer not to Jutes, but to the Frisians, using the pet name of giants (he thinks the fth reference literally refers to giants).
Glossed by most modern editors as an East Germanic people, Lat. Gepidae: Klaebers
Beowulf, p. 248.
See the discussion in Widsi, ed. Malone, pp. 1625.
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Helmingas (620b, Wealheows people), Hetware (2363a, 2916a), Hugas
(2502b, 2914a),55 Merewioingas (2921a),56 Wendlas (348b), Wgmundingas
(2607b, 2814a), Wylngas (461a, 471a).57 Arguably the terms used to describe
the poems monstrous races (ylfe, eotenas and gigantas, orcneas) should
also be understood as part of its conspectus of peoples.58 In all, the names of
peoples in Beowulf constitute a plausibly Baltic/Scandinavian set of signiers,
one notably without direct reference to the English.59 As for toponyms, the
poem mentions Earnans and Hronesns, both landmarks on the Geatish
coast (3031b; 2805b, 3136b), Hrefnawudu and Hrefnesholt (2925b, 2935a,
Ravenswood), Hreosnabeorh (2477b, a hill in the land of the Geatas),60
Freslond (1126b, 2357b, land of the Frisians), Scedenig (1686a, that is Skne,
the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula), Swiorice (2383a, 2495a), and
Wedermearc (298b); Heorot itself can be considered a toponym. Apart from
the Finnesburh episode and the many references to Danes and Geatas, it is
notable that the majority of ethnonyms and toponyms come from the second
half of Beowulf. This concentration is indicative perhaps of a broadening of the
poems focus, and a shift of theme from the successful inter-regional collaboration exemplied by Beowulfs success against the monsters in the land of the
Danes to the succession of inter-regional feuds that populate the poem after
Beowulf returns to the Geatas.
Consideration of the use of ethnonyms and toponyms in the poem further
suggests three thematic clusters moments at which the poem opens out
to show us a regional space, and, crucially, interrelation of regional players.
55
56
57
58
59
60
The Hetware are usually glossed as Frankish, and identied with the Latin Attuari/Chattuari;
an association of the Hugas with the Chauci has been rejected by more recent scholarship,
and they now tend to be localized to the area between the Seine and the Loire: for discussion
of both ethnonyms, see W. Goffart, Hetware and Hugas: Datable Anachronisms in Beowulf ,
in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. C. Chase (Toronto, 1981), pp. 83100.
On the use of the term Merovingian in the poem, see the recent debate between T. Shippey,
The Merov(ich)ingian Again: damnatio memoriae and the usus scholarum, Latin Learning and
English Lore I, 389-406, and W. Goffart, The Name Merovingian and the Dating of
Beowulf , ASE 36 (2007), 93101.
On Swedes, Wgmundingas and Wylngas, see R. T. Farrell, Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats,
SBVS 18 (1972), 22486.
See A. Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity
(Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 6674.
The references to Offa (king of the continental Angles) at lines 1949 and 1957 have been seen
by many commentators as a point of identication for the poems English audience. See, for
example, Niles, Old English Heroic Poems, pp. 6771. For other possible indirect references to
English peoples and places in the poem, see S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking
Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge, 1993), R. North, The Origins of Beowulf: from Vergil to Wiglaf
(Oxford, 2006).
See Orchard, Critical Companion, p. 172, for the suggestion that this toponym should be
emended to Hrefnaburh (ravens stronghold).
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Alfred Hiatt
These are, unsurprisingly, interlinked. One, woven through the poem, is the
disastrous raid on Frisia by the Geatish king Hygelac. The story is proleptically
introduced at the moment when, following his ght with Grendel, Wealheow
presents Beowulf with the Brosinga mene: we are told that the necklace was
(later) worn by Hygelac when he was killed by the Franks (11971214a). It is
analeptically repeated when Beowulfs ascent to the Geatish throne is narrated,
and again when, at the end of the poem, a messenger warns of the dangers
facing the Geatas following the death of Beowulf (2354a2366; 2913b2921).
Apart from the Brosingas, Hygelacs raid calls for reference to Frisians and
Franks, and the specic Frankish or Frankish-aligned tribes, the Hetware
and the Hugas. The episode of Hygelacs raid and death has historiographical attestation in the form of Gregory of Tours Historia Francorum as well as
later accounts in the chronicle of Fredegar and the Liber historiae Francorum. It
is possible that the Beowulf-poet knew of the event from one such source,61
but whatever the poets source(s) of information on this matter, so signicant
is Hygelacs raid that it might be best to regard this event as a nodal point of
the poem,62 a moment which connects several different narratives: Beowulfs
life and legend, the history and fate of the Geatas, DanishGeatish relations,
SwedishGeatish relations, and the doomed nature of peace-weaving through
gift-giving.
The second thematic cluster occurs in the course of the Finnesburh episode,
which calls for references to Frisians and Jutes, as well as Danes. Both Hygelacs
raid and the Finnesburh episode establish something of the spatial as well as
political relationships between the Danes and the Geatas on the one hand,
and the Frisians and Franks on the other. The key element here is not land
but water. The story of Hygelacs attack on the Frisians/Franks concludes, in
one of its tellings, with Beowulfs return to the land of the Geatas over the
sea, bearing the war-gear of thirty warriors (2359b2362). The extraordinary
tension of the Finnesburh episode results from the inability of the Danes to
cross the sea from Frisia to Denmark in winter time. The change of seasons
enables the return of the Danes, and their subsequent revenge mission,
culminating in the death of Finn and the seizure of Hildeburh.
The third thematic cluster is the narration of the SwedishGeatish wars by,
respectively, the poems narrator, Beowulf, and the messenger, in a continuation of the speech that starts with the warning about the perils faced by the
61
62
Goffart, Datable anachronisms and The Name Merovingian and the Dating of Beowulf ,
argues for the likelihood of the Liber historiae Francorum as the source, Shippey against: The
Merov(ich)ingian Again.
For analysis of the narrative signicance of Hygelacs raid, see especially A. G. Brodeur, The
Art of Beowulf (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 7887, and M. Lapidge, Beowulf and Perception, PBA
111 (2001), 6197, at 702.
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Geatas and the story of Hygelacs raid. As Klaeber noted long ago, the land
of the Swedes (Swiorice, Sweoeod) is described as separated from the land
of the Geatas by water.63 The sons of the Swedish king Ohthere seek refuge
with Hygelac by coming ofer s (2380a); their rival, Onela, against whom they
have rebelled, is described as the best of sea-kings (2382, selest scyninga);
Beowulf subsequently supports Eadgils, one of Ohtheres sons, in a battle
to reclaim his inheritance ofer s side. Beowulf describes the feud between
the Swedes and Geatas as taking place ofer wid wter, ofer heafo;64 and
the messenger describes the Swedish king Ongeneows apprehension about
Geatish sea-men and sea-faring warriors (2954a, 2955a). It is important, in
my view, not to try to superimpose a modern map of Scandinavia onto these
descriptions the topography is imprecise in terms of direction and distance,
but what is clear is that the poet has in mind peoples who dwell on or near to
water, which they must cross to reach each other. As in the Danish topography
in the rst part of the poem, though, refuge may be sought in strongholds, or
in a wood such as Ravenswood.
The theme of exile, inherent in the narration of the SwedishGeatish
conicts, is consistent with a number of references in the poem to personal
origins in ways that indicate an interest not simply in ethnic identity, but
also in people who are, ethnically and therefore geographically speaking, out
of place.65 Beowulf himself is the son of an exile (of unspecied ethnicity)
who sought refuge at Hrogars court. Early in the poem we are told that
Hrogars messenger and go-between in Heorot, Wulfgar, is a man of the
Vendels (348b, Wendla leod). No explanation is given for how Wulfgar has
found employment with Hrogar, but a telling indication of the practice of
employing foreign warriors is given in Beowulfs narration of Hygelacs reign
shortly before he attacks the dragon. Hygelac bestows land on Beowulf, with
the result that:
Ns him nig earf
t he to Gifum
oe to Gar-Denum
oe in Swiorice
secean urfe
wyrsan wigfrecan
weore gecypan.66
63
64
65
66
Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, 3rd ed., p. xlvi.

Beowulf, 2394a (across the broad sea), 2473a (across the wide water), 2477a (across the
seas).
A point cogently made by P. Wormald, Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the AngloSaxon Aristocracy, in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in honour of the 1300th Anniversary of
the Birth of Bede, given at Cornell University in 1973 and 1974, ed. R. T. Farrell, BAR 46 (Oxford,
1978), 3290, at 34, drawing on R. Girvans 1935 study, Beowulf in the Seventh Century.
Beowulf, 2493b2496: He had no need to seek an inferior warrior and to buy him at a price
among the Gifas or the Spear-Danes or in Sweden.
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It is not only mercenaries or exiles who are marked as ethnically different,
however. Hrogars queen, Wealheow, is herself a lady of the Helmingas
(620b, ides Helminga)67 and she is not the only foreign queen in the poem:
Hildeburh and Freawaru are both Danes among, respectively, the Frisians
and the Heaobards, while the tyrannical Modryo (or ry, or Fremu) is
reformed through marriage to the Angle Offa.68
Perhaps most curious of all are Beowulf and Wiglaf themselves. We are
explicitly told that this pair are Wgmundingas yet the meaning of this signier remains unclear. Although by the end of the poem he identies as and
with the Geatas, Wiglaf certainly appears to be part Swedish (at least, his father
fought on their side, and he is even introduced as a leod Scylnga). Ethnic
duality may help to make sense of the apparent confusion that surrounds
Beowulf s role in the GeatishSwedish conicts: grandson of Hrethel, protector and avenger of Heardred, and eventually king, yet apparently entrusted with
the kingdom by the Swedish king Onela.69 However Beowulf s and Wiglafs
genealogies are read, the poem seems at times to insist on interspersal of ethnic
identity. That is, Beowulf is careful to mark the identities of outsider gures
people who have originated from different ethnic groups, but who operate
within the structures of their host peoples, whether as queen, courtier or
warrior. The interspersed nature of ethnic identity in the poem is by no means
the same thing as the postcolonialist notion of hybridity,70 nor does it indicate
any kind of dissolution of ethnicity. Instead, it contributes to the construction
of a world in which identity derives from interpersonal relations rather than
from a relationship to land. Consistent with other early medieval expressions,
then, the idea of nation resides with a people, and not with a spatially dened
entity.71
It is possible to take this account of spatiality in Beowulf further by connecting it with the poems repeated and uent movement between present, past and
67
68
69
70
71
Farrell argues that Wealheow is a Wylng: Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats, pp. 24550.
For a summary of recent discussion of the vexed question of Offas queen, see the notes on
lines 193162 in Klaebers Beowulf, pp. 2226.
For discussion of this contested aspect of the poem, see Farrell, Beowulf, Swedes, and
Geats, N. E. Eliason, Beowulf, Wiglaf and the Wgmundings, ASE 7 (1978), 95105, and
more recently M. D. C. Drout, Blood and Deeds: the Inheritance Systems in Beowulf , SP 104
(2007), 199226, at 21618. It may be time to reconsider Eliasons position that it would be
unthinkable or even ridiculous (p. 98) for Beowulf to be half-Swedish.
For denition and discussion, see J. Kraniauskas, Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: LatinAmericanist and Post-Colonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies, Hybridity and its Discontents:
Politics, Science, Culture, ed. A. Brah and A. E. Coombes (London, 2000), pp. 23556.
For instance, Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 9.2.1: Gens est multitudo ab uno principio orta,
sive ab alia natione secundum propriam collectionem distincta, ut Graeciae, Asiae. (A gens
is a multitude descended from a single origin, or distinct from another natio according to a
particular grouping, as in the people of Greece, of Asia.)
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future time. References to regional spaces and to peoples and their conicts
tend to come at moments in the poem when the recent past or the near future
is invoked. For example, the accounts by Unfer and Beowulf of the competition between Beowulf and Breca, or Hrogars discussion of Beowulfs father,
Ecgeow, each involve travel, whether because of exile or for sport, across seas
but within a region in the recent past, or, at least, within the living memory
of the teller. Similarly, Beowulfs anticipation of the troubles that will follow
the marriage of Freawaru and Ingeld, which he condes in Hygelac, projects
inter-ethnic conict into the near future. These contrast in the poem with references to what might be thought of as a deep past, a legendary and biblical
time associated with origins (whether of Scyld Sceng, the dragons hoard, or
of Grendel and his mother and Cain). Is it in conjunction with shallow past
and future time that we see the region? The poems preoccupation with coastal
topography can, in this regard, be seen to achieve its ultimate end in the proleptic description of Beowulfs barrow. At Hronesns, Beowulf commands, his
barrow should tower, indeed it should become something that seafarers name
after him: t hit sliend syan hatan/ Biowulfes Biorh (28062807a).72
It may seem strange that, in a poem so apparently unconcerned with precise
signication of space, its hero should express the desire to be remembered as
a toponym, but given the texts emphasis on the coast as the meeting point of
sea and land, a site of origin and end, it feels wholly appropriate for Beowulf
to envisage his memorial on land, yet seen from the sea. It might be noted,
however, that Beowulfs vision of his monument shades into the deep time
of Scylds arrival: there is no telling for how long seafarers will look upon his
biorh.
in p atriam un a ep o s
My discussion so far has sought to establish that the range of ethnographic
and topographic reference in Beowulf has the effect of constructing a region,
with a set of interrelations reected in the fates of individuals as well as
peoples. I have also suggested that the poem manages to create a sense of
regional history, intimately connected with the sea, extending back into the
distant past, and forward to an uncertain future. In the nal section of this
article I will explore two implications of my argument that this regional
space is one that cannot properly be apprehended by means of a map. What
happens when we start to view Beowulf off the map? The rst implication,
I suggest, is that it might be more protable to see Beowulf as a poem about
a region and its peoples rather than a poem about an ancestral homeland. A
review of the history of Beowulf scholarship reveals that the maps of Beowulf
72
So that afterwards seafarers will call it Beowulfs barrow.
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Alfred Hiatt
discussed at the beginning of this article are the products and successors,
conscious or unconscious, of several generations of speculation and argument
about the texts geography. Early students of the poem, often motivated by
nationalist impulses, attempted to pin down the location of Beowulf in parts
of modern-day north Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and in more than one
instance, England. This activity began immediately upon publication in 1815
of G. J. Thorkelns edition of the poem. Thorkeln, an Icelander in Denmark,
had condently proclaimed the poem an Epos de Scyldingis: it was, he felt,
a monument of the old Danish world (monument[um] veteris orbis Danici),
which his edition had brought back from a long exile: after more than one
thousand years, an Epic returned from exile into the fatherland that was once
its own.73 He included no map to guide the reader, but in an index of proper
names Thorkeln explained that Beowulf s Dene encompassed the three
kingdoms of the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians. The poems Nor-Dene
were Norwegians; its East-Dene Swedes or Geatas; its Su-Dene the insular
Danes, including the inhabitants of Zealand, as well as Danes who held the
southern shore of the Baltic sea; and the West-Dene, those who held northern Jutland. The Geatas he glossed as Gothi, the name under which went the
Swedes, or eastern Danes.74
Nicholaus Outzen, reviewing Thorkelns edition, asserted in contradiction
that the people called Danes in Beowulf were the inhabitants of our present
Duchy of Schleswig. The author of the poem, Outzen thought, was AngloSaxon, but one who remembered his continental homeland: [f]rom this very
fatherland of ours, which may well have been his own immediate fatherland
too . . . he therefore chose his heroes, perhaps his ancestors . . . and their
actions for the subject of his song and at the same time, in the love of his
fatherland, he imparts such detailed topographical knowledge as a foreigner
would nd it very hard to acquire and preserve so well.75 Yet in the same year
William Taylor, also reviewing Thorkeln, argued that:
73
74
75
De Danorum Rebus Gestis Secul. III & IV. Poma Danicum Dialecto Anglosaxonica, ed. G. J.
Thorkeln (Copenhagen, 1815), p. vii: Inter omnia monumenta veteris orbis Danici, qvae
tempus edax rerum nobis reliqvit, admirabile de Scyldingis Epos publici nunc juris factum
eminet; p. ix: Optimo igitur successu et uberrimo cum fructu domum reversus sum, et in
patriam una Epos, qvod suum olim fuerat, post plus qvam mille annos postliminio rediit.
Poma Danicum Dialecto Anglosaxonica, pp. 25960, 265.
Das angelschsische Gedicht Beowulf , p. 314 (Bewohner dieses unsers Herzogthums
Schleswig), pp. 325-6 (Von diesem unserm Vaterlande, das vielleicht auch gar sein unmittelbares Vaterland gewesen sein mag, . . . hat er deswegen seine Helden, vielleicht seine
Vorfahren . . . gewhlt und beurkundet mit seiner Vaterlands Liebe zugleich auch eine so
genaue topographische Kenntni, die ein Auswrtiger nicht leicht in einem so hohen Grade
sich erwerben, und so fest behalten kann); translation from Beowulf: the Critical Heritage, ed. T.
A. Shippey and A. Haarder (London, 1998), p. 130.
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[Beowulfs] origin must have been from Gothland, the south-western part of
Scandinavia, of which Gottenburg is the chief town. He was, however, become an
East-Dane. Now this epithet is applied either with respect to Denmark, or with
respect to England. If he was an East-Dane of the Danes of Denmark, he dwelled near
Lubeck; if he was an East-Dane of the Danes of England, he dwelled in East-Anglia.
The latter appears to us most probable; because, in order to visit Higelak, he is not
described as passing the Sound; and because his expedition against the Frieslanders
announces a rover of the German sea, not of the Baltic. This being admitted, the name
Gar-Dence, or Danes of the Yare, which is repeatedly applied to the crew of Beowulf,
must be interpreted to mean Danes sailing from the port of Yarmouth.76
No clear consensus emerged. In 1833, relying in part on the poems occasional

geographical allusions, J. M. Kemble opined that Beowulf was an Angle of
Jutland or Sleswic.77 Heinrich Leo sifted the poems references to places and
peoples and argued that it originated in German Angeln, at least sixty years
after the death of Hygelac.78 Daniel Henry Haigh in 1861 perhaps took the
palm when it came to tendentious localizations of Beowulf with his claim that
the poem was the composition of a Northumbrian scop:
all the events he records [not including, of course, the giant and dragon stories] . . .
occurred in this island, and most of them in Northumbria, during the fth and sixth
centuries . . . This [Heorot] I have no doubt is Hart in Durham. Its situation, about
two miles from the coast, agrees very well with the distance of Heort from the shore,
indicated in the poem; and it is just the distance from the coast of Suffolk, Hygelacs
territory, for Beowulfs voyage to have been accomplished in the time specied.79
Against such attempts one can set the position of pan-Scandinavianist sceptics
such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, who in 1841 took Kemble and Leo to task for
locating Beowulf on the map:
far less would I dream of working out, from Bjovulf, either an ethnographical or a
topographical map of the Nordic area. Therefore I regret that both Mr Kemble and
Mr Leo did dream of it, the former pulling at all the oars to move Gothland to Angeln,
the latter sparing no effort to squeeze, if possible, the whole of Scandinavia into the
Cimbric peninsula, which he sees as part of the great Germania, paying no heed to
76
77
78
79
W. Taylor, review of Thorkeln, De Danorum Rebus Gestis, in The Monthly Review 81 (1816),
51623, at 522; Beowulf: the Critical Heritage, p. 135.
The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, the Travellers Song and the Battle of Finnes-burh, ed. J. M. Kemble
(London, 1833), pp. xii, xvixvii. Subsequently Kemble substantially revised his understanding of the poem.
Bwulf, dasz lteste deutsche, in angelschsischer mundart erhaltene, heldengedicht . . . Ein beitrag zur
geschichte alter deutscher geisteszustnde (Halle, 1839), p. 19; translation from Beowulf: the Critical
Heritage, p. 229.
D. H. Haigh, The Anglo-Saxon Sagas; an Examination of their Value as Aids to History (London,
1861), pp. 3, 201.
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Alfred Hiatt
how narrow a space there still remains in the islands alone for the poems North- and
South-, East- and West-Danes.80
Two broad trends can, then, be discerned in the discussion of geography within
the history of Beowulf criticism (both of which are evident in Klaebers comments). On the one hand, there is unmistakably the desire to locate the poem
by equating its toponyms and places with modern-day places; on the other, the
denial of any geographic specicity, with an insistence on the poems vagueness. Of course, it is this very lack of specicity, allied to energetic philological
invention, that has made it possible to assert the poems location in, variously,
Scandinavia, the Baltic, Schleswig and England.
The assumption that Beowulf must in some way memorialize a homeland,
either lost or present to the poems author and audience, has remained a
bedrock of much criticism of the poem since its nineteenth-century reception.
The question has continued to be not whether the poem commemorates homeland, but rather, which homeland? In the past two decades the most inuential
reiteration and development of this position has come from Nicholas Howe.
Towards the end of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Howe
presents a detailed and subtle exploration of the poem. Building on Fred C.
Robinsons description of Beowulf s appositive style, Howe reads the poem in
terms of the relationship between its Anglo-Saxon audience and their collective
memory of the land from which they migrated:
To speak guratively, Beowulf has an appositive geography in which one term is explicit
(the pagan north) and the other is implicit (Christian England). The poets practice of
portraying his characters journeys and also of setting his digressions in distant places
creates a pattern of response for his audience. For only as they make this imaginative
journey back to the continental homeland can they appreciate how conversion altered
their condition as a Germanic people.81
As attractive and elegant as this formulation is, a view of Beowulf as a chorographic text raises some problems with it. The rst of these is that, like many
others, Howe unproblematically assumes the north as a crucial element in
80
81
Bjovulfs Drape eller det Oldnordiske Heltedigt, Brage og Idun 4 (1841), 481538, at 525 (og
langt mindre kunde det falde mig ind efter Bjovulfs-Drapen at udkaste enten et ethnogrask eller
topogrask Kort over Nrreleden. Jeg maa derfor beklage, at det er faldet baade Mr. Kemble og
Hr. Leo ind, af hvilke den Frste lgger alle Aarer ombord for at stte Gothland over til Angeln,
og den Anden sparer ingen Mie for, om mueligt, at sammenpresse hele Skandinavien paa den
Kimbriske Halve, som han naturligviis regner til det store Germanien, uden at ndse, hvor
snevert Rum der da bliver paa erne alene til Drapens Nord og Syd, st og Vest-Daner);
translation from Beowulf: the Critical Heritage, p. 245.
Howe, Migration and Mythmaking, p. 176; Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style
(Knoxville, 1985).
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Beowulf off the map

the poems spatial orientation. Yet it is not clear that the poem conceives of
its region as northern, precisely because it does not articulate a geography in
which the lands of the Danes, Geatas and so on might be contrasted with a,
or the, south. North, south, east and west appear to be relative, not absolute,
terms in the poem and indeed from the perspective of medieval geography
the British Isles and Scandinavia were as much associated with the far west as
with the far north.82 Similarly the poem makes no identication of its peoples
as Germanic. The validity of this term may be assumed by inference from
Bedes Historia ecclesiastica, where Bede referred to Germania alongside Gallia and
Hispania as parts of Europe separated from Britain by the sea, and famously
identied Germania as the region from which the Angles, Saxons and Jutes
migrated.83 Yet even in Bede the notion of Germania is neither a well-dened
nor straightforward one. As one recent commentator has noted apropos of the
migration myth, the image of a coherent origin was entirely absent in Bedes
piecemeal account.84 Crucially for the present discussion, while Bede does
include the Danes in a list of peoples in Germania in the Historia ecclesiastica at
V.ix, he does not include other Scandinavian peoples.85 Nor was his inclusion
of the Danes a necessary and obvious move: the early-eighth-century geography of Anonymous of Ravenna clearly separates the patria Germanorum
from Dania (patria Northomanorum), and the patria Scirdifrinorum vel
Rerefenorum.86 The problem in interpreting Beowulf as a text about Germania
and its peoples is, then, two-fold. First, it cannot be maintained with certainty
that its author understood the peoples of the poem to be Germanic, since the
82
83
84
85
86
Gildas, De excidio Britonum, ed. M. Winterbottom (London, 1978), III.i: Brittania insula in
extremo ferme orbis limite circium occidentemque versus divina, ut dicitur, statera terrae totius
ponderatrice librata ab Africo boriali propensius tensa axi . . .; Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.i:
Brittania Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem
locata est, my emphases. Howe explained Bedes location of Britain as the result of his reliance on Plinys Historia naturalis and the fact that he begins the Historia ecclesiastica from the
vantage point of Rome, before shifting perspective to one looking from the island south
towards Rome: Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 133.
Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OMT
(Oxford, 1969), I.i, I.xv.
Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, p. 301. Cf. the description of Germania in
the Old English Orosius, p. 12, in which the region is rapidly broken down into a mosaic of
ethnicities.
Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, V.ix: Sunt autem [in
Germania] Fresones, Rugini, Danai, Hunni, Antiqui Saxones, Boructuari. Sunt alii perplures
hisdem in partibus populi paganis adhuc ritibus seruientes . . . (Now these people are the
Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons, and Boruhtware; there are also many other nations
in the same land who are still practising heathen rites . . .).
Itineraria Romana vol. 2: Ravennatis anonymi cosmographia et Guidonis geographica, ed. Joseph
Schnetz (Stuttgart, 1990), I.xi, IV.xiixiii. Cf. Merrillss discussion of Bedes ethnic terminology: History and Geography in Late Antiquity, pp. 3007.
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Alfred Hiatt
inclusion of Scandinavian peoples in Germania was by no means automatic
practice for early medieval authors. Second, despite the fact that the poem
evinces a much more detailed knowledge of north-western Europe than available in classical, and classically derived sources, Beowulf at no point names its
region. For that would be the geographic thing to do.
As a related point, one must note Howes insistence on the dichotomy
between the continental homeland and insular England. The term continent is
itself anachronistic (since Europe, Asia and Africa were customarily described
as partes); more importantly, the action of Beowulf cannot be described as
taking place in anything that resembles a continent. Its spaces are, as previously noted, coastal, perhaps even peninsular: land always appears alongside
and between bodies of water. So it is hard to see in what sense the poet might
have conceived of the lands of Danes, Geatas, and Swedes as constituting
something continental, still less a homeland. This difficulty seems to be the
result of Howes attempts to adapt the poem to the argument of his book
that a myth of migration runs through Old English literature an argument
repeatedly juxtaposed and inected with the experience of modern American
mythologies of migration.87 Without a clear sense of a dichotomy between continent and island, Germanic centre and English periphery, the implicit relation
between the setting of Beowulf and its Anglo-Saxon audience becomes rather
less obvious. As Michelet has more recently observed, the poem seems to wish
to unsettle centres, and the centre-periphery binarism.88 Given this, it seems
hard to maintain that Beowulf would have been read for its representation of a
homeland unless, like some early critics of the poem, one is inclined to read its
action as taking place entirely within Schleswig, or England. For which is the
homeland the land of the Geatas, the land of the Danes, Sweden, Frisia or the
waters in between? A study of the poems sense of region does not encourage
any alternative suggestion as to its motivation and likely audience. But it might
enable us to view the poem less as a meditation on modern constructs such
as the north, or the pagan north, or classico-modern constructions such as
Germania, and more as a meditation upon human relations within and across a
specic part of the world characterized by the conjunction of land and sea.
The second implication brought by a reconceptualization of the spatiality
of the poem away from geography and towards chorography involves genre.
The tendency within Beowulan criticism to locate the poems action within
a homeland, and to seek to specify its geography, was in its initial formulation intimately connected with its categorization as an epic. The specicity of
87
88
E.g. Migration and Mythmaking, pp. 12, 4, 31, 56, 60, 176, 178.
Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest, pp. 11314: not only Heorot or Beowulfs hall, but
also Grendels mere and the dragons barrow are centres in the poem.
38
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the poems references to places and peoples led early critics from Thorkeln
onwards to identify the poem as grounded, as generically epic rather than
romance or pure mythology, and to argue about precisely which national/racial
culture it represented. The equation between geography and epic was perhaps
made most concisely by W. P. Ker in 1912, when he commented that the
story of Beowulf is not in the air, or in a fabulous country like that of Spensers
Fairie Queene; it is part of the solid world. It would be difficult to nd anything
like this in later medieval romance. It is this, chiey, that makes Beowulf a true
epic poem that is, a narrative poem of the most stately and serious kind.89
Like almost all aspects of Beowulf, of course, its genre has attracted debate and
difference: Kemble concluded that the poem was essentially mythical, later
nineteenth-century proponents of Liedertheorie saw it as a combination of lays,
and J. R. R. Tolkien memorably and polemically insisted that Beowulf is not an
epic, not even a magnied lay. No terms borrowed from Greek or other
literatures exactly t . . . It is an heroic-elegiac poem; and in a sense all its rst
3,136 lines are the prelude to a dirge.90 Following the move away from oralformulaic theories, critics of the poem are now perhaps more inclined to see it
as a learned, literary work, imbued with traces of classical and Christian-Latin
epic, though certainly heroic.91 But despite the poems generic indeterminacy,
maps continue to linger as part of its paratext.
If we were to classify Beowulf as a romance, however, the necessity of cartography might seem less obvious. No less than epic, romance narratives
characteristically contain toponyms. A core generic feature is the journey. Yet
modern editors rarely supply romance texts with maps. The Song of Roland, the
Lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales all,
usually, are published map-free, despite the fact that all contain quite detailed,
and indeed much debated, topographies. Even though scholars have carefully plotted many of the places mentioned in these texts, such maps have not
succeeded in becoming part of the critical apparatus for any of them.92 Why?
The maps traditional function as a representation of the real and romances
(postmedieval) divorce from history seem to act as a barrier to their union.
Geographic accuracy is not a concern of romance: real place names are mixed
89
90
91
92
English Literature: Medieval (London, 1912), pp. 334. Kers emphasis.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, PBA 22 (1936), 24595, at 275.
See further T. A. Shippeys valuable survey, Structure and Unity, A Beowulf Handbook, pp.
14974.
E.g. Orchard, Critical Companion, pp. 1327; North, Origins of Beowulf; D. Anlezark, Poisoned
Places: the Avernian Tradition in Old English Poetry, ASE 36 (2007), 10326.
I base these assertions on a survey of ten modern editions of The Song of Roland and ve editions each of the Lais, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Canterbury Tales, none of which
contains a map. For maps of Gawain country, see R. Elliott, Landscape and Geography, A
Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. D. Brewer and J. Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), 10517.
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Alfred Hiatt
with fantastic and mythical, implausibilities of travel are rife, detail comes in
and out of focus. All of the preceding sentence after the colon could, of course,
be validly said of medieval maps. It may be, then, that it is not the absence of
spatial representation from romance that has prevented editors from supplying
maps, but rather its superabundance. Romance plays fast and loose with reality
and so may only map incompletely on to modern cartography: in other words,
there is a mismatch between romance space and a modern map, even though
(some of) the same places are present on both. But is the same not also the case
with epic and heroic narrative? Homers geography inspired but also baffled
countless commentators; medieval epics such as the Nibelungenlied are noted for
their tendency to mix fantasy with accurate and historically veriable reference
to places. In the same text precise references to Danubian Austria coexist with
mythical entities such as Nibelungland, while the capital of Iceland is given
as Isenstein.93 So if one reason that editors tend not to map romance is that
it is difficult to construct realistic maps of romance topography, then it might
equally be said that to apply a realistic map to an epic, or a heroic poem, is to
distort its text. Conversely, if romance cannot be mapped because its spatial
reference is too vague or too much a mixture of the specic and the vague
we should look carefully at the spatial reference of epic to see whether it is
equally unclear.
The purpose of this article is not to call for a ban on maps illustrating
Beowulf. There can be little doubt that the maps in editions of Beowulf help the
reader to gain some grasp on the spatial interrelations that the poem describes.
But readers need also to think about the disjunctions between modern maps
and the Old English poem, and to realize that any map with or without
lines of longitude is anachronistically appended to the poem. Beowulf is not a
geographic text. It is a poem that describes not a single adventure but several;
not a single place, but several; relations between not two peoples but between
many. In doing so it constructs something that cannot, ultimately, be reduced
to a homeland: the space Beowulf writes is regional, a periphery without a centre,
whose overriding motifs are exile, mixture, loss and survival.
93
See A. T. Hattos brief discussion of the geography of the poem, in The Nibelungenlied, ed.
A. T. Hatto, rev. ed. (London, 1969), pp. 3969. Editions of the Nibelungenlied are also normally published without maps, though such images have appeared in commentaries on the
poem such as O. Ehrismann, Nibelungenlied: EpocheWerkWirkung (Munich, 1987), p. 310
(Ortsangaben zum Nibelungenlied).
40
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Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S026367510999010X

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longitude and latitude added an air of verisimilitude at once anachronistic and

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Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 76.

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Figure 5: Reykjavk, Stofnun rna Magnssonar, GKS 1812 4, 5v-6r. Thirteenth-century

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Elsewhere a more restricted topography seems to be invoked: schere is said

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Beowulf, 571572a: I was able to see sea-cliffs, the windswept walls.

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Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, 3rd ed., p. xlvi.

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So that afterwards seafarers will call it Beowulfs barrow.

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No clear consensus emerged. In 1833, relying in part on the poems occasional

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English Literature: Medieval (London, 1912), pp. 334. Kers emphasis.

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